Tuxmachines' 3rd quarter report

Well, another 3 months has gone by bringing my official time online to 9 months. Boy how time flies.

The big news this quarter was the hardware upgrade. I wonder if anyone noticed the site performing a bit better. We're still limited by my bellsouth business dsl pipe, but the server is functioning much snappier now.

Prior to that I had to let some of the older logs go as it was boggin down the database quite a bit. In fact I only keep the last 3 months or so around now, so for those of you using the "hit" block, the hit count is only accurate for the last 3 months. Well, who knows how accurate it really is, but it has logged the following numbers:

October was a real good month. We had several stories linked to by the biggies. The lg3d story was linked to by slashdot that overwhelmed the pipe and brought us to just about a stand-still for a day or two. OSnews linked to my suse 10.0 and 10.1 alpha 1 stories. Some other stories got mentioned in the comments of slashdot and OSnew as well bringing in a few hits. A lot of folks linked to my suse 10.0 story and Linux Today linked to several as well. I'm not sure we can top the wonderful month October was.

I'm not sure we can top October especially now. I've went back to working a real job recently and just don't have the time and energy to devote to my reviews and stories that I've had the past coupla months. I expect hits to drop at least slightly and probably dramatically.

I have just started using a stats counter within the last week. That way we can get some of the cool statistical information other sites have available like browser and refers, and most importantly - hits. It only got fired up Oct 30, so don't expect much for that month and I lost some logs somehow in messing around cleaning up after the hardware change over and also with changing some options and logging methods, so November will not be accurate either. Hopefully starting in December we can get some kind of idea about our traffic here at tuxmachines.

Another fly in the soup is that I must go back to school next semester and take a master's level course or lose my license to practice my profession. So, I thought as long as I was enrolling, I'd just get started on my master's degree. What this means to the site is even less time for me to review distros and talk with developers, what with a full time job and part time school. I'll work on the site as much as possible and try to keep it up to or surpass the quality standards I've tried to set. We will probably just see less original content.

And then of course, there hasn't been as many distros released passed coupla weeks either. So, October may go down as our record month.

Again as every quarter, I want to put out some thank you's. Thanks to atang, gryphen, vonskippy and others, who keep the comments block ever changing, and Texstar who drops by on occasion to sprinkle our stories with witty comments and blogs on occasion. Thanks to Tex's site as well for linking to us. Thanks to the established high-traffic sites who honor us with an occasional link and all the smaller sites who link to us often. Thanks to all the visitors, other commentators, and those who submit news, without whom there would be no Tuxmachines. Biggest thanks goes to Distrowatch who continually supports us and has really had the biggest influence in what I consider our successful last quarter.

If you have a news link or would like to write a review, just click the submit news link. You can create a blog or forum topic by clicking the create content link.

I've had less trouble with 'meanies' this quarter since I turned off the mail server. It still comes on several times a day for a few seconds to pushout the site mail, so if you sign up or lost your password or whatever, please be patient until your email from us arrives.

I guess that's about it. Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

First, a thank you to srlinuxx for your kind words. From the moment I was successful in installing PCLinuxOS I knew that I had discovered something wonderful. My Linux experience is brief compared to the many outstanding developers out there who have created thousands of OpenSource applications, but I believe that everyone from Linus Torvalds to the disenfranchised M$ Windows user has something important to contribute to the cause.

That being said I agree very much with what atang1 has suggested. Tuxmachines can and should move in the direction of becoming a means to give a sort of "seal of approval" to the numerous Linux distros. Sure there are going to be those who may disagree with our critiques and opinions, but if we are going to assist the masses in migrating to this platform, then they need to know the good from the bad.

It should be pointed out that regardless of what rating a distro receives there will always be room for improvement and a determined pursuit of excellence to remain competitive in the market.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Latest News

Games for GNU/Linux

Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.
Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

Containers News

Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.
The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it's tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

AMDGPU News

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD.
This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.